Japan and China marked the 50th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic relations on Thursday with little mood for a grand celebration as tensions remain over a territorial row and a deepening rift between Beijing and Western nations over Taiwan.

Messages of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Chinese President Xi Jinping are scheduled to be read out at an event hosted Thursday afternoon by the Japan Business Federation, the country's most powerful business lobby better known as Keidanren said.

With Kishida being absent from the Keidanren event in apparent consideration of strained bilateral ties, Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi will deliver a speech.

On Wednesday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told Wan Gang, vice chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, that the two countries need to make efforts to "build a constructive and stable relationship," according to the Japanese Foreign Ministry.

Wan visited Japan to attend a state funeral for slain former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Bilateral relations remain precarious with continued tensions over the Japan-controlled, China-claimed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea as well as in the Taiwan Strait.

In August, Beijing conducted large-scale military drills near Taiwan in response to U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island. Some of the ballistic missiles fired during the exercises fell in Japan's exclusive economic zone.

On Sept. 29, 1972, then Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka and then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai signed a joint communique in which the governments of the two Asian countries agreed to "establish relations of perpetual peace and friendship."

In line with recognizing the Communist-led People's Republic of China as the "sole legal government" of China, Japan severed diplomatic relations with self-ruled democratic Taiwan, formally called the Republic of China.

Beijing and Taipei have been governed separately since they split in 1949 due to a civil war. China regards Taiwan as a renegade province to be reunified with the mainland, by force if necessary.

China's economy rapidly grew under its "reform and opening-up" policy launched in 1978 and the country overtook Japan as the world's second-biggest economy in 2010, with its gross domestic product ballooning to 3.6 times that of Japan in 2021.

Due partly to the COVID-19 pandemic, official in-person meetings between leaders of Japan and China have not been held since December 2019, when Abe held talks with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. In October last year, Kishida and Xi agreed during their telephone conversation to seek "constructive and stable" relations.

==Kyodo

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